Effective Unconscious Bias Training Models for Health Professions Faculty and Staff (IDEAS) - March 9

Recorded On: 03/09/2022

Everyone has bias. The way we perceive the world is influenced by the environments in which we grew up, cultural norms, and the people we surround ourselves with. Many of these factors impact our behavior without our knowledge, leading us to do things that contradict our conscious beliefs, such as unintentionally treating a colleague differently because of their race, or overlooking a talented candidate for a job because of harboring hidden stereotypes about their ability. Implicit bias is with us every day, and it affects our capacity to achieve equity.

There are promising solutions in the works. Providing implicit bias training to faculty and staff may mitigate the impact of bias in the education and training of the healthcare workforce. Although evidence-based training models exist, effective implementation of those models is critical. Some universities have found that mandatory training can incite backlash, while voluntary training is unlikely to reach those who need it most. In addition, not all biases can be addressed at once; separate trainings are needed for racial bias, gender bias, disability bias, etc. We must also shift focus from the idea of a singular trainings towards a focus on tailored lifelong learning and professional development.

Learning Objectives:

  • Share evidence-based research on implicit bias in the healthcare workforce
  • Describe  strategies  and challenges to implementation of training
  • Describe effective models for training health professions faculty and staff to recognize and address bias

PRESENTATIONS

Effective Implicit (Unconscious) Bias Training Models for Health Professions Faculty and Staff: Lessons from the Front Line

Presenter
Janice A. Sabin, PhD, MSW
Research Associate Professor
University of Washington, School of Medicine Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education
Adjunct: Research Associate Professor, School of Social Work

The Importance and Challenge of Bridging the Gap Between Cognitive and Experiential Knowledge of Implicit Bias: Lessons from the Front Lines

Presenter
Jennifer Tjia, MD, MSCE, FAAHPM
Professor (tenure track) of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences
Division of Epidemiology
UMass Chan Medical School

About IDEAS
The AAMC IDEAS (Inclusion Diversity, Equity, Antiracism) Webinar series provides actionable information about DEI strategies that you can put into practice to become a more effective and successful leader, educator, and member of the academic medicine community.

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Janice Sabin, PhD, MSW

Research Associate Professor
University of Washington, School of Medicine
Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education

Affiliated Faculty
University of Washington School of Medicine Center for Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Dr. Sabin is a Research Associate Professor, University of Washington, School of Medicine, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education. Dr. Sabin is affiliated faculty with the University of Washington, School of Medicine Center for Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (CEDI). Her area of interest is racial/ethnic/other healthcare disparity populations with an emphasis on understanding mechanisms and pathways that lead to unequal treatment in health care. She has deep expertise in implicit bias in healthcare and experience in design and evaluation of educational interventions to define and address biases. Dr. Sabin is one of the earliest investigators in the world to apply the science of implicit bias to health care disparities research. She develops implicit bias curriculum for healthcare trainees, healthcare providers, academic medical faculty, medical HR departments, risk management, and other institutional groups. She develops and evaluates in-person and web-based education interventions for local and national audiences that focus on the science of implicit bias.

Dr. Sabin's research includes examining patient-provider communication in real-world clinic visits, pediatricians’ racial bias/discrimination in treatment decisions for African American and white patients, racial/weight bias among providers in the Indian Health Service, provider bias toward people with mental illnesses, providers attitudes toward sexual orientation, and community based participatory research with African American and American Indian/Alaska Native communities. Dr. Sabin's presentation topic areas include social determinants of health, health and healthcare equity, the science of implicit bias, the value of and best practices to increase health workforce diversity, and actions to mitigate the impact of implicit bias on individual and institutional behavior.

Jennifer Tjia, MD, MSCE, FAAHPM

Professor (tenure track) of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences
Division of Epidemiology
UMass Chan Medical School

Dr. Jennifer Tjia is the principal investigator (PI) of a NIH R01 clinical trial of a community-engaged intervention to mitigate implicit bias in clinician-patient relationships. Her unique skill set includes community-based health organization leadership, resident curriculum development, evaluation of simulation-based physician encounters for high-stakes examinations, and the conduct of cluster randomized controlled trials. She is dual board certified in Hospice and Palliative Medicine (HPM) and Geriatric Medicine and has over 20 years of experience as an academic physician providing clinical care to diverse populations of patients in urban settings.

As a clinical educator, she has helped train many classes of medical students, residents and fellows, led the clinical skills development course for the primary care residents, and worked as a Patient Note Rater responsible for the evaluation of simulation-based examinations for the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) and the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME). She also has a long-standing commitment to education and mentorship of research trainees as a faculty member of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and MD/PhD learning community mentor. She is recipient of a 2015 Cambia Health Foundation Sojourns Leadership Scholar award, recognizing her as a national leader committed to improving the lives of patients with serious illness through community engagement and health system transformation.

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